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Further Reading

Paragon deserved better. Epic Games’ recently shuttered title looked like a third-person shooter, but it was all MOBA under the hood. That might not seem like an argument in its favor, as conventional wisdom says the MOBA genre is oversaturated and already behind the multiplayer curve. This gorgeous contender was a bit different, however. It learned from the mistakes of similar abandoned projects and constantly shot for something just a little bit different from mainstays like League of Legends and Dota 2. That drive to find its own niche should have been Paragon’s greatest strength, but it might have ended up as the game’s greatest weakness.

Now Epic has moved onto bigger, more profitable, and arguably better things with Fortnite: Battle Royale, the biggest thing in the gaming world since the last biggest thing in the gaming world. The 100-player slugfest is certainly more popular than Paragon’s relatively staid five-on-five battles—especially based on rumors that few people were still playing by the end.

The more I play Fortnite, though, the more I see a lot of Paragon’s DNA.

A MOBA out of time

Paragon set a development tempo few other live games can match, save Epic’s own Fortnite. For a chunk of its life cycle, the MOBA introduced a new playable hero every three weeks. That frequency dwarfs League of Legends’ average of about four heroes per year and, to a longtime Dota 2 obsessive like myself, that sounds like the payoff to some awful blood magic. It’s even more impressive considering that many of Paragon’s new heroes were more fun and interesting than the somewhat bland original cast—like a support class ogre who healed allies by literally playing the drum solo of life.

That march of progress didn’t stop with just heroes. Epic was remarkably open to rebuilding Paragon’s foundation all throughout its permanent beta phase. When fans complained about sluggish matches that could average an hour or more, Epic tossed the game’s single map overboard in 2016 and redrew the battle lines from scratch.

Enlarge/ Paragon looked great, if sometimes in a bland, generic MOBA-ish sort of way

This new arena, “Monolith,” cut the usual game time to 30 minutes or so, undercutting your Dotas and your Leagues. The very same update also completely reworked the game’s “card” system. It retained the Hearthstone-like deck building that let players tweak how players played, but it sawed the system's complexity in half.

Through constant updates, Paragon quickly morphed into a MOBA that real human beings with real responsibilities could enjoy. That its shooting and slashing had a satisfying, slightly languid “pop” to it wasn’t just icing, either. The game managed to tap into that intrinsically satisfying MOBA feeling of turning AI-controlled enemies into pinatas without requiring esports-level reflexes fueled by Monster Energy. The sound effect for scoring the last hit on a minion was endlessly gratifying.

Despite all the industriousness that helped Paragon steadily distinguish itself from its concrete competition, the game couldn’t quite overcome the weight of its genre. No matter how much Paragon tried to suss out and blend together what similar games were offering (shorter match times, more direct action), it was still a MOBA and seen as such.

Perhaps there was a time people genuinely believed League, Dota, or even just Heroes of the Storm could be dethroned from one of those top spots. Paragon missed even that window of plausibility by at least two years. These days, MOBA fans are almost monastically locked into their own chosen game and won’t budge to even try a competitor. By the time Epic could seize on what the genre was missing, the whole scene had already become synonymous with impenetrability and disingenuous copycats.

Learning from the past

Fortnite doesn’t have that same problem, even as it inherits most of Paragon’s strengths.

When Fortnite first announced its hard pivot from cooperative base-building game to a Battle Royale competition, many industry watchers initially dismissed it as an obvious cash grab. But the major difference compared to Paragon was that, this time, Epic was actually ahead of the genre lifecycle curve.

Fortnite didn’t just beat its closest competitor (the explosively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) to consoles, but it did so for the low price of “free-to-play,” with faster pacing and the Minecraft-like construction intact. Then it did the same thing on those ubiquitous smartphones that seem to be all the rage for gaming these days.

That combination of development speed, price, and platform availability made Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode a viral hit with its intended teen audience, well before EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher under the sun started to trip over themselves to crank out their own Battle Royale genre cash-in.

Further Reading

But despite not being a teen and being personal ambivalent toward Fortnite, I’m happy to see Epic has tried to match Paragon’s frantic update cadence for its new hit. Just a few weeks ago, Fortnite got remote-controlled missiles that players could fire and surf themselves. Then, when it was clear the weapon wasn’t working as intended, Epic removed it just as quickly as it had been added. Likewise, the studio has addressed player complaints of slow building speeds by adding a grenade that explodes into prefab forts.

Enlarge/Fortnite shows Epic's continued willingness to change its games at a moment's notice

Just as Paragon’s new heroes altered the potential flow of every match, these items dictate the rhythm of a game that is entirely built on randomly discovered loot. And just as Paragon once threw out its map to make for a tighter experience, Fortnite is now going through its own major map change. Weeks of teases, courtesy of a comet just barely visible in the in-game sky, recently culminated in an impact that changed Fortnite’s one-time ghost town of Dusty Depot into Dusty Divot—now a hotbed of unique items and player activity.

And that’s just the question that seems to drive the development of both Paragon and Fortnite behind the scenes. Why not? There’s a sense of constant change to Fortnite that should be familiar to Paragon’s longtime fans. One week it’s a goofy new skin. The next, everyone is sure aliens are invading. They aren’t at all the same kind of game (unless you count the similarly squishy shooting), but many of the very same elements that made me appreciate Paragon over time are there.

That constant willingness to evolve should have earned Paragon something more than its fate as yet another be abandoned and forgotten MOBA. I’m glad, then, that parts of its spirit seem to live on in Fortnite, a game that’s very much here to stay.

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57 Reader Comments

I wish they'd taken the paragon universe/environments and turned them into a full fledged first person shooter. FPS games have always been Epic's bread and butter, and given the assets they had made already, I think it could have been beautiful and unique.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

Come on man, there's two paragraphs in the middle of the story saying exactly that.

Quote:

Fortnite didn’t just beat its closest competitor (the explosively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) to consoles, but it did so for the low price of “free-to-play,” with faster pacing and the Minecraft-like construction intact. Then it did the same thing on those ubiquitous smartphones that seem to be all the rage for gaming these days.

That combination of development speed, price, and platform availability made Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode a viral hit with its intended teen audience, well before EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher under the sun started to trip over themselves to crank out their own Battle Royale genre cash-in.

I applaud them for making this game so much more playable than the competition. I don't personally enjoy the building mechanic so I don't spend much time playing Fortnite. I prefer PUBG for the "realism" but it's so severely lacking technically that it's almost difficult to stay a fan.

Fortnite gets Thanos/Skins, weapons and a new city, PUBG gets a patch that introduces invisible walls that kill you on impact while in a vehicle. It's not even close in terms of quality, if anything, this will be PUBGs downfall.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

First, the article specifically says Fortnite is successful because they got into the Battle Royale genre early. So not sure you’re arguing against what’s in the article.

Second, Epic does a good job iterating on what makes a game fun. Most online games take months to deliver balance changes or new content (and usually just re-skins), but Fortnite has changes at least once a week. That rate of change and improvement is what he’s saying has carried over from Paragon and kicks Fortnite up a notch over the competition.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

*citation needed

;-)

Seriously, “copies the most popular shooters” is what describes 99% of all shovelware failures. It took the best parts, combined them well, and iterated constantly until they were polished and BETTER THAN THEIR SOURCES.

It’s basically like the Apple of gaming—not a single original idea but it makes such a nice product with them, and beat everyone else to the biggest market. Even better, without Apple’s ego or lawsuit-happy nature.

Having tried Paragon, there was one major itch that bothered me about the game, and it was the card system. Cards were automatic until level 5, and then customizable past that, with card packs being bought loot box style. But dying when you couldn't change your cards or someone had something more powerful? Felt awful.

The beauty of Battle Royale is that everyone is even from the very beginning of the game. You can have poor luck, but there's no fundamental "My numbers are bigger than yours" behind the scenes.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

Come on man, there's two paragraphs in the middle of the story saying exactly that.

Quote:

Fortnite didn’t just beat its closest competitor (the explosively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) to consoles, but it did so for the low price of “free-to-play,” with faster pacing and the Minecraft-like construction intact. Then it did the same thing on those ubiquitous smartphones that seem to be all the rage for gaming these days.

That combination of development speed, price, and platform availability made Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode a viral hit with its intended teen audience, well before EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher under the sun started to trip over themselves to crank out their own Battle Royale genre cash-in.

And where is the bit showing how Paragon's failure influenced this success? Unless copying faster the big lesson learned from Paragon's failure. Which, when you think about it isn't much of a lesson at all.

Epic has spent a lifetime making derivative products. You'd figure they'd know time to market matters when you're cranking out clones.

Derivative like the Unreal Engine that so many of these games are and have been built on?

Edit: I don't have any skin in this game, maybe I'm living in the past, or don't really understand Epic as well as I thought

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

Come on man, there's two paragraphs in the middle of the story saying exactly that.

Quote:

Fortnite didn’t just beat its closest competitor (the explosively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) to consoles, but it did so for the low price of “free-to-play,” with faster pacing and the Minecraft-like construction intact. Then it did the same thing on those ubiquitous smartphones that seem to be all the rage for gaming these days.

That combination of development speed, price, and platform availability made Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode a viral hit with its intended teen audience, well before EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher under the sun started to trip over themselves to crank out their own Battle Royale genre cash-in.

And where is the bit showing how Paragon's failure influenced this success? Unless copying faster the big lesson learned from Paragon's failure. Which, when you think about it isn't much of a lesson at all.

Epic has spent a lifetime making derivative products. You'd figure they'd know time to market matters when you're cranking out clones.

Derivative like the Unreal Engine that so many of these games are and have been built on?

PUBG is Arma plus a Japanese movie premise. Overwatch is pretty much the 2016 zeitgeist. I guess those games are totally original and new if you ignore the fact they are just building on other games.

I play Fortnite, I enjoy it. I do wish the actual gun play felt less random. I've said it before on Ars, but the tickrate needs to be higher for Fortnite. It's around 18hz. For Comparison, CS:GO has 60hz and 120hz tick rate servers. It just makes the gun play feel arbitrary and random, and why in Fortnite positioning (aka build fights) are so key.

I wish they'd taken the paragon universe/environments and turned them into a full fledged first person shooter. FPS games have always been Epic's bread and butter, and given the assets they had made already, I think it could have been beautiful and unique.

You know, they did make the assets "free" in Unreal. I wouldn't be surprised to see an ambitious group go and do a cool FPS with them... and others will make several hundred identical looking games with garbage code/design making the good few indistinguishable from the pack.

Paragon - Recruit the team and then build the systemFornite - Lets just in house mod our game and steal already productive staff from our Paragon team and put them on Fortnite. They're already seasoned dealing with PvP playerbases.

IMO, Paragon ended up not being a failure. Because it was EPIC's training grounds for Fortnite. PUBG is evident that the team was not near as mature to handle day to day balance issues, bugs, server issues, or have the platform experience that EPIC has going into Fortnite.

As much as I'm not a fan of the building gameplay of Fortnite, I have lots of respect for the developers that run Fortnite. They seem good at what they do, and have a great engine and assets to back them up.

Author's thesis is unfounded nonsense. Article does not back up what the title claims.Fortnite is successful because it is free, copied the two most popular shooters - pubg and Overwatch, and is multi-platform.

Come on man, there's two paragraphs in the middle of the story saying exactly that.

Quote:

Fortnite didn’t just beat its closest competitor (the explosively popular PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds) to consoles, but it did so for the low price of “free-to-play,” with faster pacing and the Minecraft-like construction intact. Then it did the same thing on those ubiquitous smartphones that seem to be all the rage for gaming these days.

That combination of development speed, price, and platform availability made Fortnite’s Battle Royale mode a viral hit with its intended teen audience, well before EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and every other major publisher under the sun started to trip over themselves to crank out their own Battle Royale genre cash-in.

Free to play made a big impact - but I think the biggest reason why Fortnite was successful was because it felt like a finished, polished game with an accessible art style. Every battle royal game/mod/addon/etc before fortnite has been a buggy mess of garbage. Ever since DayZ people have been saying "why hasn't a big studio done this genre correctly yet, they could make millions" - Epic took Fortnite, which already had well polished animations, decent cartoony graphics, an intuitive building system, overall-polished gameplay and gunfighting and simply pivoted it.

Personally, I hated the idea because honestly at that point I really hated Epic. I played Fortnite since OT2 and in the earlier alpha's the game was significantly better than the "save the world" is now. The overall gameplay was similar, but the difficulty ramp was more interesting, the overview of the city for upgrades was more intuitive and creative than the menu system they have now. The classes were better designed and felt unique. The game had issues, which tons of players on the forum called out - I personally wrote a 6 page google docs document detailing some changes me and a few friends that played would have liked to see and stuff. And instead of listening to the community they went down this weird path of adding as much lootbox/random/microtransaction content as they possibly could while simultaneously destroying the more creative and well designed aspects of the game. When it shipped it was a complete shitshow - almost everyone that purchased that game at day one that wasn't in the beta was upset with it. (the beta people knew it was coming)

But at the time it wasn't just Fortnite - UT project and Paragon were treated similarly - there is still no word on what is going on with UT4, if it's still being developed or what.. and even when it was developed it was a mess. The beyond Unreal community was basically controlling the development - any new ideas were met with criticism on the forums if they didn't mimic UT99 enough. It turns out early 2000 design mechanics aren't very fun in 2015 onward.. the game has like 20 people playing now or something. Paragon got similar treatment to fortnite where Epic refused to listen to feedback and ended up eventually killing their own game because they really wanted that shitty/confusing card system for monetary reasons.

So now Epic takes Fortnite after it ships and is in a terrible state and completely pivots it to a BR and essentially abandoned the campaign aspect of it for the first few months. It felt really shitty honestly having been someone that played it for 4+ years to watch it just get completely gutted and temporarily abandoned.

That being said they do update the Save the World part now and the BR is obviously really successful and a good game overall. But I personally don't think Epic learned much from their other failures - it's just that Fortnite's BR doesn't have the same problems that Fortnite OT's did or Paragon did because it completely skipped that part. It didn't feel like a money grab or have really poorly designed elements that needed to be corrected because BR is relatively straightforward from a design perspective. It felt like a game that people have been asking for, a BR game that's actually polished and not an early access mess. The free to play and welcoming aesthetic furthered its success. And yeah - changing the map with a meteor "narrative" and whatnot is only adding to the polished feel of the game.

I applaud them for making this game so much more playable than the competition. I don't personally enjoy the building mechanic so I don't spend much time playing Fortnite. I prefer PUBG for the "realism" but it's so severely lacking technically that it's almost difficult to stay a fan.

Fortnite gets Thanos/Skins, weapons and a new city, PUBG gets a patch that introduces invisible walls that kill you on impact while in a vehicle. It's not even close in terms of quality, if anything, this will be PUBGs downfall.

Edit: grammar

Hey! We can throw apples at each other now while we wait for the round to start. Development resources well spent... /s

Edit- Judging from the down votes at least four people think the ability to throw pregame apples at each other is a value add...

And since the MOBA acronym doesn't actually describe anything useful, it's basically a game like DotA or League of Legends. There's two teams, each with their own sides of the map, who try and fight and slowly push through each other's sides of the map. Minions/"creeps" which follow very simple bot controls walk down the map as well, and killing them gets each player gold. Generally a game is structured to farm the creeps for about 10-20 minutes while sometimes clashing with enemies (the creeps clash against each other in neutral territory) and then later the teams will group up to fight.

They also have an insane learning curve. The learning curve is absolutely ridiculous in MOBAs not so much because the genre is inherently complicated. but because each MOBA will have at least 50 characters, with LoL at around 140 and DotA at around 110, with each character having (at least) 4 abilities. Players in general are expected to know every character's abilities, cooldowns, attack range, typical item buildpaths, strengths, and weaknesses.

So it's not really a surprise that no one wants to leave the MOBA they already know. I think Dawngate was the only latecomer that had any promise (no item actives; simple albeit weird rune system; small character pool at the beginning) but that got killed off pretty quickly.

Edit: looks like the links got ninja-added between when I read that and clicked the quote button

One interesting thing is that Epic apparently makes it VERY easy to spend money in Fortnight. I'm not sure if my son decided to buy stuff and then not fess up or if the game legitimately makes it opaque to know what's a purchase after you have a linked credit card. We originally paid for a $35 pack after my son earned it through some good grades, the wife got her CC statement and there was a total of over $75 in charges from the game on it. Not a huge deal as my son appears to be getting easily $75 worth of enjoyment from the game and I can afford it, but I have to wonder how many others who can't afford it are running into the same thing and how many kids have gone a bit more crazy running up significant charges?

I play Fortnite, I enjoy it. I do wish the actual gun play felt less random. I've said it before on Ars, but the tickrate needs to be higher for Fortnite. It's around 18hz. For Comparison, CS:GO has 60hz and 120hz tick rate servers. It just makes the gun play feel arbitrary and random, and why in Fortnite positioning (aka build fights) are so key.

It's funny because I learned that I was very very spoiled with hitboxes and server tick rates only once I started playing PUBG. My primary shooter growing up was CS:S. People play on servers that they get good latency, and even once CS:GO came out, Valve backs up their matchmaking servers and they're not slacker servers. They can easily handle 60 tick, and 120 isn't out of the question.

Meanwhile you get cloud dependent servers that run off 20 tickrates and it's a world of difference.

I never thought of CS as having state of the art, top tier tickrates and hitboxes, but I suppose they do. BF4 also has solid hit detection.

A huge issue is more that cloud servers also have such variable ping. Some PUBG games feel great, others not so much. Death Replay has almost made things worse.

Fortnite succeeded because it did everything exactly opposite of Paragon.

Paragon - Years late to the partyFortnite - Built off of a mature game that had been polished and worked for YEARS.

…

PUBG is evident that the team was not near as mature to handle day to day balance issues, bugs, server issues, or have the platform experience that EPIC has going into Fortnite.

As much as I'm not a fan of the building gameplay of Fortnite, I have lots of respect for the developers that run Fortnite. They seem good at what they do, and have a great engine and assets to back them up.

Amazing how Epic can take a game that had been languishing for years, kitbash a trendy game mode into it, dump it on the market for free, and iterate on it at ludicrous speed because they've been working on the game's engine for decades, and all anybody can say is, "Why can't you do that, PlayerUnknown?"

So, I started playing Fortnite in earnest this week. It's ironically similar to the aforementioned Infinity War zeitgeist. I've got to tell ya, I can see the appeal of watching and playing with friends for sure. There are mechanics, like actual button functions, that are really complex. It's a hard game to get used to. I even found myself watching Ninja, just to see how comparatively terrible I am. I can't say I'll stick with it, but it's interesting.

Battle Royal is the latest industry cancer and Epic can continue to go fuck themselves for screwing over both their Paragon community and the original Fortnite community that had their game hijacked before it was even finished.

Battle Royal is the latest industry cancer and Epic can continue to go fuck themselves for screwing over both their Paragon community and the original Fortnite community that had their game hijacked before it was even finished.

Fortnite single player was nearly DOA, and it was merely a ten year late to the minecraft wannabe party anyways.

Paragon community? Yeah, I felt sorry for him but you can't keep developers busy because of one guy.

One interesting thing is that Epic apparently makes it VERY easy to spend money in Fortnight....

You actually have to go in and explicitly buy stuff (it's not like some games where there is some sort of "fluffy bunnies" proxy currency that automatically extracts real world money) but of course they put up minimal hurdles once you actually hit the buy button.

But yeah, they make it very attractive to spend cash - My son put on about $120 (of his own hard-earned so absolutely his right, but I still stepped in to add an additional hurdle/justification to the process).

As someone who had played Paragon religiously and was very active in the community, Epic doesn't deserve credit for this "we tried" bullshit act because if you followed it as it was happening you'd know how much they messed things up as the went along, which it's clear the author of this article wasn't seeing as though the card system rework and new map were updates that happened nearly a year apart from each other.

MOBAs aren't even close to a dead genre of game. No, I'm not saying they're as popular as say Battle Royale and that it would have competed with Fortnite. However, new MOBAs still have room to succeed, especially when they bring something the rest of the competition doesn't, which is what Paragon did; the (original) itemization system had more complexity (and than any other MOBA, it was unique in that it bridged the gap between FPS and MOBA games, and took advantage of it with the being the only cross-platform MOBA as well as being one of few to be on console in the first place. It even had a very dedicated team working on it as well as with the community... Or at least it did, for a while.

So then how did it fail? Well for starters they never really marketed it. The closest thing I'd seen for marketing was when the basic version of the pre-open beta was free for PS+, but even that wasn't all that obvious that this freebie existed and it featured an inferior version of the game that it became just a few months later. Fortnite on the other hand I get ads for every time I go on a computer, talking about their Twitch Prime promos. Hell, I'd seen ads for Fortnite before the BR mode even existed. Not Paragon though; ads for it never even existed from what I can tell.

It's not that they tried to market it and failed either. It's that they didn't try at all. They didn't even set anything up between the two games to try to bring some of those numbers over which would have been free! Just throw a skin into Fortnite for having people play games in Paragon and boom, free marketing with the biggest game on the market.

Then there was the lack of tutorials. For a complex game like a MOBA (especially the one that had the most complex itemization system) there needs to be a lot of explaining. Smite for example is an arguably simpler game yet has multiple tutorials for gameplay alone. Paragon on the other hand had a VERY basic gameplay tutorial with and didn't explain deck building/itemization at all.

The biggest problem though, and why it seems like all ex-Paragon players have some sort of personal vendetta against Epic, was when they randomly started to defy the wishes of the community that basically worshipped them for they're transparency and working with players to bring something people liked. They couldn't draw in new players (which could easily be attributed to the lack of marketing/tutorials) so they make the game easier and cut out much of what made the game feel nice and balanced (see the Kwang buff and ex-Hero Designer Cam Winston's "data") to try and dumb down the game for others but all that did was drive old players away and repel new players thanks to the now boring game play. Meanwhile, the community is basically BEGGING for better tutorials, the reversal of some of the controversial changes, marketing, a ranked mode (yes, this was a MOBA with no ranked mode) and they just completely shrugged it off, and even now they still have the audacity to say "we dunno what when wrong" when it's staring them right in the face.

Here's another thing: we don't actually have any proof Paragon wasn't making a profit. I'm sure it wasn't a complete cash cow (especially considering the above) but it very well could have been turning a profit. The Paragon community was and still is a very tight-knit community too, so shutting down the game that the community had dedicated so much to was a huge slap in the face, especially considering the profit behemoth Fortnite is now they're at no shortage of cash; some of that could have been used to keep Paragon as a side project or even just to keep the servers up, but they'd rather fuck over the somewhat small yet dedicated player base for that extra $$$.

Being an ex-Paragon player in a Fortnite-centric world feell like one of those movies where everything is perfect but there's that underground group of people that know the truth about some twisted stuff the government is hiding or whatever. If you played Paragon, like really, REALLY played Paragon, then you'd know Epic isn't the perfect hero-of-the-people publisher that everyone thinks they are now. Articles like this talking about how great Epic is for making Fortnite, especially when Paragon is involved and treated as a failure due to concept rather than developer mistakes, really gets me on edge.

Fortnite shares a lot of similarities with League of Legends in its early stages. It's a polished, free-to-play take on an emerging genre that's ahead of the competition by at least a year, and manages to keep the attention of its fanbase—and use that to spread through word of mouth and community enthusiasm—via constant updates and a fast feedback loop with players.

On that note, there was a period in League of Legends in which new champions launched every -two- weeks—each patch cycle.

I kind of miss Paragon, played the crap out of it for almost 2 years. It had potential but Epic fucked it up (dumbing down the map and card system, hiring that mobile gaming hack as a director, etc.)It was good while it lasted.

As someone who had played Paragon religiously and was very active in the community, Epic doesn't deserve credit for this "we tried" bullshit act because if you followed it as it was happening you'd know how much they messed things up as the went along, which it's clear the author of this article wasn't seeing as though the card system rework and new map were updates that happened nearly a year apart from each other.

I don't know a lot of MOBAs that make fundamental systems reworks more than once a year, which is what the card and map thing sound like. That's more or less the cadence I saw for League of Legends.

Quote:

Then there was the lack of tutorials. For a complex game like a MOBA (especially the one that had the most complex itemization system) there needs to be a lot of explaining. Smite for example is an arguably simpler game yet has multiple tutorials for gameplay alone. Paragon on the other hand had a VERY basic gameplay tutorial with and didn't explain deck building/itemization at all.

I don't know of a single MOBA that has good tutorials. Constant updates, balance tweaks and changes in the metagame make tutorial content stale fairly quickly: people learn the game by playing, and by watching streamers or YouTubers make content around it. If Paragon failed, it's certainly not due to lacking decent tutorials just like LoL and DotA2.

Quote:

Here's another thing: we don't actually have any proof Paragon wasn't making a profit. I'm sure it wasn't a complete cash cow (especially considering the above) but it very well could have been turning a profit. The Paragon community was and still is a very tight-knit community too, so shutting down the game that the community had dedicated so much to was a huge slap in the face, especially considering the profit behemoth Fortnite is now they're at no shortage of cash; some of that could have been used to keep Paragon as a side project or even just to keep the servers up, but they'd rather fuck over the somewhat small yet dedicated player base for that extra $$$. Being an ex-Paragon player in a Fortnite-centric world feell like one of those movies where everything is perfect but there's that underground group of people that know the truth about some twisted stuff the government is hiding or whatever.

This sounds like straight-up conspiracy theories. Unless you think Epic's management is fuelled by spite, you can bet that the cost of keeping Paragon going—the true cost, considering both operating, development and publishing costs plus the opportunity cost of not developing for Fornite—dwarfed the income they were receiving. And to my knowledge, the community that actively played it was comparatively tiny and on a downward or stable trend.

Quote:

If you played Paragon, like really, REALLY played Paragon, then you'd know Epic isn't the perfect hero-of-the-people publisher that everyone thinks they are now. Articles like this talking about how great Epic is for making Fortnite, especially when Paragon is involved and treated as a failure due to concept rather than developer mistakes, really gets me on edge.

Of course they're not a perfect hero of the people. Blizzard and Riot fans have gone on the same spiritual journey of realizing that the company that makes the thing they love is not crewed by saints—even if the people who work there have genuinely good intentions. Fortnite players are just on the same honeymoon period that you were in with Epic when Paladins launched.

As someone who had played Paragon religiously and was very active in the community, Epic doesn't deserve credit for this "we tried" bullshit act because if you followed it as it was happening you'd know how much they messed things up as the went along, which it's clear the author of this article wasn't seeing as though the card system rework and new map were updates that happened nearly a year apart from each other.

I don't know a lot of MOBAs that make fundamental systems reworks more than once a year, which is what the card and map thing sound like. That's more or less the cadence I saw for League of Legends.

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Then there was the lack of tutorials. For a complex game like a MOBA (especially the one that had the most complex itemization system) there needs to be a lot of explaining. Smite for example is an arguably simpler game yet has multiple tutorials for gameplay alone. Paragon on the other hand had a VERY basic gameplay tutorial with and didn't explain deck building/itemization at all.

I don't know of a single MOBA that has good tutorials. Constant updates, balance tweaks and changes in the metagame make tutorial content stale fairly quickly: people learn the game by playing, and by watching streamers or YouTubers make content around it. If Paragon failed, it's certainly not due to lacking decent tutorials just like LoL and DotA2.

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Here's another thing: we don't actually have any proof Paragon wasn't making a profit. I'm sure it wasn't a complete cash cow (especially considering the above) but it very well could have been turning a profit. The Paragon community was and still is a very tight-knit community too, so shutting down the game that the community had dedicated so much to was a huge slap in the face, especially considering the profit behemoth Fortnite is now they're at no shortage of cash; some of that could have been used to keep Paragon as a side project or even just to keep the servers up, but they'd rather fuck over the somewhat small yet dedicated player base for that extra $$$. Being an ex-Paragon player in a Fortnite-centric world feell like one of those movies where everything is perfect but there's that underground group of people that know the truth about some twisted stuff the government is hiding or whatever.

This sounds like straight-up conspiracy theories. Unless you think Epic's management is fuelled by spite, you can bet that the cost of keeping Paragon going—the true cost, considering both operating, development and publishing costs plus the opportunity cost of not developing for Fornite—dwarfed the income they were receiving. And to my knowledge, the community that actively played it was comparatively tiny and on a downward or stable trend.

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If you played Paragon, like really, REALLY played Paragon, then you'd know Epic isn't the perfect hero-of-the-people publisher that everyone thinks they are now. Articles like this talking about how great Epic is for making Fortnite, especially when Paragon is involved and treated as a failure due to concept rather than developer mistakes, really gets me on edge.

Of course they're not a perfect hero of the people. Blizzard and Riot fans have gone on the same spiritual journey of realizing that the company that makes the thing they love is not crewed by saints—even if the people who work there have genuinely good intentions. Fortnite players are just on the same honeymoon period that you were in with Epic when Paladins launched.

Yes, Paragon's fall cannot be attributed to any one thing, which is why I listed several. Paragon's tutorials were especially bad though, especially for a game that's pointed towards a console audience (who've hardly seen any MOBAs.)

Also, there's nothing really far-fetched to say that moving Paragon's team to Fortnite makes them more money, and there's no reason to believe this wasn't the reason, especially after they've lied many times before.

I'm just sick of Paragon, which was once a good game, getting slammed by people that haven't even been aware of the game before just because it was shut down to feed Fortnite. Honeymoon phases are fine, but the way people are putting them on a pedestal is insulting to all the game communities they abandoned in the past.